Uk politics

Bring back Nicola Sturgeon. The race to replace her as SNP leader and first minister has turned into the mother of all culture wars. Who would have thought that the party of independence would start tearing itself apart over a law on same sex marriage that was passed nearly a decade ago? The early front runner, Kate Forbes, provoked fury among ‘progressive’ SNP supporters on Twitter by saying she opposes gay marriage – something everyone who knows her knew perfectly well. She is an evangelical Christian for heaven’s sake, a member of the Free Church of Scotland. Of course she opposes gay marriage. That along with having children out of wedlock and working

Westminster is back to the Brexit wars this week. Once again, a Conservative leader is trying to finalise a deal with Brussels while facing warnings from their own side that it could prove a compromise too far. On Friday, there was much fanfare that a new deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol could be imminent. Rishi Sunak flew to Northern Ireland to meet with the DUP – where talks proved amicable. Then the Prime Minister met European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on the fringes of the Munich security conference. However, since then a string of Tory MPs have spoken publicly to raise their concerns and Sunak has been

Rishi Sunak is once again facing an unhelpful intervention from one of his predecessors. As the Prime Minister attempts to finalise a deal on the Northern Ireland Protocol – spending the past few days meeting both with the DUP and the president of the European Commission – Boris Johnson has issued a warning. A source close to Johnson told the Sunday Telegraph that ditching the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill in favour of a new Brexit deal would be a ‘great mistake’. Speaking this morning on the BBC, government minister Penny Mordaunt sought to downplay the comment – describing it as ‘not an entirely unhelpful intervention’. Some MPs supportive of Sunak

Praise be. A day or two ago, something potentially quite exciting took place in Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire. It was a two-day conference and its guiding question – according to documents obtained by the Observer – was: ‘How can we make Brexit work better with our neighbours in Europe?’ Gathered there, and not a moment before time (though some might say five or six years ago might have been better still), were a number of politicians and public figures. It’s described as having been a ‘private discussion’. There are two things that seem worth noticing about this. The first, which is very encouraging, is that the meeting involved people who were both pro- and anti-Brexit in the first place, and

This week’s public disorder outside a hotel accommodating asylum seekers in the town of Knowsley in Merseyside was in some ways inevitable. A total of 45,756 people entered the UK on small boats via the English Channel last year – which, according to the 2021 Census, is a number larger than the entire population of English towns such as Dover in Kent, Boston in Lincolnshire and Kirkby in the Metropolitan Borough of Knowsley. Britain’s asylum regime should be prioritising the world’s most persecuted peoples, especially women and girls at major risk of sex-based violence in their conflict-ridden homelands. Instead, it has been reduced to a survival-of-the-fittest system which has been

The time it takes to mount a political comeback gets shorter and shorter, doesn’t it? The last prime minister but one barely got his toes in the sand on his first holiday after leaving the post before he was flying home with thoughts of mounting a return to high office. Now his successor, too, is campaigning to get on track to get her old job back.  The first wallop of Liz Truss’s one-two punch was a long article for the Sunday Telegraph explaining why the mini-Budget that so spectacularly sunk her premiership was, in fact, absolutely the right thing to do; punch number two will be an interview with Spectator TV that goes up

Today, if you feel so inclined to celebrate it, is Brexit Day: the date on which, three years ago, Britain formally left the EU – although the transitional arrangements kept us effectively within the bloc for a further 11 months. But does anyone feel like celebrating? Only really in the Lincolnshire Wash, going by an opinion poll commissioned by the website unHerd. That is the only part of the country, it seems, where most residents still think that Britain was right to bid adieu to its European neighbours. Nationally, 45 per cent of people think Brexit is going worse than expected, according to polling by Ipsos Mori. This figure is a rise

As the skies darken over Rishi Sunak’s embattled government, with ministers being fired or placed under investigation, opinion polls dire and few signs of better times ahead, Tory optimists are (somewhat desperately) searching for signs that all may not yet be irretrievably lost for their party. The hopeful precedent that they have come up with is the 1992 general election. That year, things did not look good for John Major, the man who had replaced Margaret Thatcher under controversial circumstances just two years before. The opinion polls predicted a narrow but clear victory for Labour leader Neil Kinnock until Major, then a much-mocked figure, got on a soapbox – literally – and